There's a bug in Apple's most recent operating system

Elbert Graham

If you do that, High Sierra promptly sets up a new account called System Administrator and a home folder located in /private/var/root. Some users have reported triggering the exploit from the login screen, but we could only consistently recreate the issue from System Preferences.

Appleconfirmed that it was already working on a solution. The attacker needs only to head to Users & Groups, click the lock at bottom-left, then try to log in as "root" with no password.

That's the bad news. "It allows everyone with access to your machine - and in some cases remotely - to escalate the privileges to the highest level of them all".

Tests of the flaw indicate that it could be used to alter a user's system settings that normally require a chosen username and password.

The simple exploit means anybody with physical access to your MacOS High Sierra device can log in on your computer, no matter how secure your passwords are. They could reset or change passwords, delete or add users and Apple IDs linked to the machine, and dip into other accounts on the system - essentially, they would get unfettered access to all the data that lives on the computer.

It appears the flaw is isolated to High Sierra 10.13.1 (17B48).

Apple hasn't commented yet, but in the meantime, don't let anyone physically use your Mac computer if you're not there until Apple issues a fix.

Published to Twitter on Tuesday by software engineer Lemi Orhan Ergin, the vulnerability is alarmingly straightforward.

This is a serious flaw and you should act quickly to defend yourself.

Click the lock button, then enter your username and password when prompted.

Click in the Directory Utility window, then enter an administrator name and password. This blocks the bug from creating another root account.

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